The Fire Took the Brewery. It Didn't Take the Beer.

Koholā Brewery opened in Lahaina in 2015 — a whale of a name, in the old whaling town on Maui's western shore. For eight years it was the town's brewery the way a brewery becomes a town's: the place locals took visitors first.

On August 8, 2023, the Lahaina wildfire destroyed most of the town, and the brewery burned with it. The research trail from those weeks records what towns do: the community rallied, and benefit beers were brewed for Lahaina while its own brewery was ash.

Here is the part the archive exists to keep straight. The building was gone. But Lahaina Brewery, Inc. — the company Mary Anderson had been running since 2020, as she told the Maui County Liquor Control Commission — was not a building. And the Koholā beers were not a building either. In February 2025, Anderson signed legislative testimony in Honolulu as owner and President of Lahaina Brewery, Inc. dba Koholā Brewery: a company whose brewery no longer existed, still speaking for its beer.

That July, the company that had lost its home bought one. Lahaina Brewery acquired Mahalo Aleworks — the young Upcountry brewery Ben Kopf had opened in Makawao in 2021, at 1,900 feet on the slopes of Haleakalā. The two operations were unified under a new name that is also the oldest name there is: Lāhainā Brewing Company, pouring in Wailea and Upcountry, with the Koholā Series carried on as its flagship line.

A brewery burned. A company held. A brand crossed the island and kept pouring. If you only had one field to record "Koholā Brewery" in, every version of the story you could tell would be wrong.

That's Tally's Take.

What the archive holds

Three records, on purpose. Koholā Brewery is recorded CLOSED — the Lahaina operation ended with the fire, and a closure is never a deletion. Mahalo Aleworks is recorded CLOSED as a predecessor — acquired July 2025, its Makawao site brewing on under the new flag. And Lāhainā Brewing Company is ACTIVE, owned by Mary Anderson, carrying both lineages. The acquisition and the ownership are dated, evidenced events in the record — not a paragraph, a chain.